This game literally killed my entire family.
A long, long while ago I made the mistake of purchasing this aztec death hex disguised as a wholesome Garfield Garf Experience. That day had been marked by an unfamiliar, crushing feeling of dread that welled up in my bones like poison. That awful feeling only intensified whenever I looked at it in my library, creeping through my veins and down my spine like black, rotten blood.
So i bought it to play with my friends. That day was spent in joyus jubilee, having many Garfs with my friends. Plenty of Laffs™ were had all around. I wondered why exactly it had instilled me with this primal sense of dread, why staring at the orange cat in my library filled me with an equivalent feeling to a caveman learning why exactly we learned to fear the uncanny valley. I went to sleep that night with a smile on my face and hope for the future in my heart.
That night, I dreamed.
I saw that cat in my dreams, Garfield™. His lazy, blank-eyed expression, that smug smile. His beady black eyes bore into my own, and i was struck in my unconsciousness with the sudden inablity to breathe. I fought for breath, as if the very sight of the orange cat was akin to drowning, to a weight on my chest flattening my lungs and stealing my breath. Garfield just stood there and smiled. He didn't even say anything. He just watched me suffer, suffocate. It was almost like he enjoyed it, like those impassive blank eyes held a speck of pleasure, revelling in my anxiety and panic. I woke up in a cold sweat.
Of course, as any rational Human being, i am human, i stood up and began to cry. I ran over to check on my family, only to find a scene so horrible I never quite recovered. There, in the living room, sat an orange cat. Garfield™ the Garf Field™. He stood there, standing over what could only be described as some vague analogy to Vector™ (Vector™ Cereal, Eat Today for Vector™ Sports Food Vector™ Energy™ Sports Cereal™ Buynow Buy™ Cereal™) cereal, but made entirely of human meat. Of course, the sheer horror brought my next words from deep in my diaphragm, shouted out into the dead silent air and shattering the unearthly silence.
GARFIELD!!!!™ Did you turn my family into human meat cereals??
Word for word, that is what I uttered. But the monstrous feline Garfolomew™ simply stood there and smiled back at me. What he said next was haunting, and I'm not quite sure the words will ever leave me. What he said was...
i create those food
I collapsed to my knees. I was admitted to a hospital shortly after, since a welfare check ordered by my neighbour found my comatose body on my floor. The people who come to my cell tell me it was a prank. One of them even looked like my mom, my brother, my father, and the one that looked like my mother said things like 'hon, I'm your mom, we were pranking you, we know you love Garfield™, please come home, we miss you.' I think they're just trying to make me feel better. All i know is that i will never be the same. What does a man do, once your family is turned into meaty treaties by Garfield™? Nothing, is what.
I am writing this on my laptop they occasionally let me have in my padded cell. The food here isn't bad. The people who say they're my parents come back and cry sometimes. I don't know why. They ask when I'll come back home, mention someone's name. Alas, but who am I? What is a man? What am I? My sense of self has been annihilated. I look down and all i see is orange fur and regret. What did they used to call me before I played this game?
The agony in losing who you are is not knowing what you lost. The doctors try and help me, to study my head and figure out where everything went. I can't help them back. Their faces, the faces I once knew float around in my mind like fractured pieces of glass in an inky black void. I run my hands desperately through the hungry nothingness, but every time I try and grasp at something I remember, a familiar face, the shards stab through my hand, slip out of reach, and leave nothing but an open wound. I'm supposed to know this. I'm supposed to remember them. They ask me what I remember. I say Garfield™.
Thoughts pass through my head like sand through mesh. The grains slip through the holes, leaving nothing but specks and hints of what was meant to be there. Time passes like a blur, an impenetrable divide in my mind before and after Garfield™. Sleep, wake, eat, sleep. I don't regrister even the fact that there's a world outside this cell. I'm not sure I exist. I vie desperately for the future, for one day to finally cross that divide and find out who I was, to find out what's happening outside my own deteriorating mind, but i fear the inky blackness between the spaces not filled. I fear it, for if I gaze long enough into the abyss of cognitive decline, I know I'll find a set of eyes staring back through the festering cracks of my shattered psyche.
Garfield's eyes.
Annihilation.
